


m0st pe0ple

by aedonprose



Series: The Rarepair Archive [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Slow Burn, Urban Fantasy, death is left ambiguous, the violence isnt that bad btw but better safe than sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-15 10:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3444443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aedonprose/pseuds/aedonprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ghost looked at him. John thought she did, anyway: she had no pupil or iris. Her corneas bled across her eyes and they shone, slightly. She did not look blind, though, any more than she made John feel restful.<br/>'You don't have to say anything,' she said, in the same low monotonous tone. Her voice sounded young, with the smallest hint of an accent. John realised, without that eternal deathly weight behind it, that it might have sounded happy. 'Most people don't bother.'</p><p>John did not expect to be summoned to run casual errands for Death, but he finds he does not particularly mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The light had been pale grey all the past week, as if the city was enclosed inside a glass dome and somebody was pouring sand over the top, watching clouds and grit slide down the edges and obscure the light. Somebody just like John, who played with the worlds of smaller organisms, only bigger by an order of magnitude. Like at the end of  _Men in Black_ , when those aliens played weird alien marbles with planets. (If John played tiddlywinks with Petri dishes, he would get fired pretty damn fast, though.)

The street he turned down to get to the bus station was colder than the surrounding air somehow: how did he always manage to pick the worst ones? John pulled his scarf tighter around his neck to stop his fingers twitching: after years of microbiology, the echoic urge to button down a white coat he wasn't actually wearing always stuck around for a while after work had finished. John walked fast. It was November, the air was cold, he had an apartment with heating that could go up to a hundred-and-six degrees and boy was he going to use it! 

Why exactly was it, he wondered, that this street was the coldest? He busied his head with theory as he made his way to the other end of the alley. Perhaps the high buildings sitting squarely on either side of it sat too high, and too square, to allow the sunlight to angle its way in. Perhaps the garbage dumpster halfway, with its warm sickly leftovers of life, stole the heat from the middle of the alley where John walked. Perhaps, when quiet grunting builders first laid the stones over the street, they had selected by accident those rocks with the least heat-retention, the ones which could not keep warmth captive. Perhaps there was a  _ghost_ in the alley, leaching all the warmth from sun and stone alike; standing liminal and quivering, only just enough life to stay in the world she wanted to. (she?)

John should have reached the end of the alley by now. 

'See, when you are looking at time from a different realm, time doesn't really work the same way,' said the girl floating two inches above a dumpster, perhaps a yard ahead of John. 'Most people don't get that about ghosts.'

Her voice, John decided immediately, was calmer than anything he had ever heard, including when his sister broke her hip and had huge amounts of morphine intravenously given while she was still awake. Something about the calm was off, though. When humans were calm, there was nothing wrong, or they had accepted a situation faults and all. The ghost sounded as if her problems were so faint that she had forgotten to care about them - the result was that instead of an acceptance which leaked into other people, the ghost's voice was fringed with panic for the listener. 

'Uh,' he said, because he thought he should say something. 'Wow. Hi.' 

The ghost looked at him. John thought she did, anyway: she had no pupil or iris. Her corneas bled across her eyes and they shone, slightly, looking like a picture of an old man with cataracts John had seen once on TV. She did not look blind, though, any more than she made John feel restful. Her tangled black hair and her clothes fluttered gently, in a breeze John could not feel. As she floated, her feet hung loosely beneath her, and John could see her feet: one bare and dangling with a loose silver chain looped around the ankle, one in a long striped sock which sagged around halfway down her shin. The silver chains on her wrists and her ankle were rusted. Her clothes - a long, loose grey skirt and a simple black tee - were in tatters, and looked so old as to be flaking apart rather than ripping. As John watched, a tiny portion of the edge of her skirt fell slowly, like a feather, and burnt itself out in the air as it moved away from the ghost. A translucent sheen of pale grey hung over her skin, washing her out and making her somehow both more ephemeral and more threatening.

The ghost looked at John. John looked at the ghost.

'You don't have to say anything,' she said, in the same low monotonous tone. Her voice sounded young, with the smallest hint of an accent. John realised, without that eternal deathly weight behind it, that it might have sounded happy. 'Most people don't bother. I am just the messenger. There is no point in talking to me.'

'Man, that sounds depressing,' said John frankly. 'This is cool. I've never met a ghost before. What's your name?' 

She ignored him, or he thought she did. 'John, you have a task to complete,' she said, and she bundled herself up and pushed herself into the air ahead of him. John got the sense she was holding herself aloft from her hands. He walked down the alley after her. The world stretched and bent around them in the corners of his vision, but whenever he put his foot down it met solid ground. He gave up trying to figure out what was happening, in the end, and just focused on the still, swooping figure in front of him.

-

Sunlight blared. John smelt salt and sharp breeze. He stepped out of the alley and found himself squinting at sunlight which bounced with perfect accuracy off an azure sea, and a tiny strip of blinding sand,  _right_ into his fucking face. He felt cool behind him, and turned to see a towering cliff-face of dark grey rock. At the top, in front of the sun, he made out something vaguely person-like moving.

'Whoa, who's that?' he asked.

'He killed her.'

The ghost was standing (not) looking sadly at a girl of about seventeen folded like a blot in the light ground. Her body was crumpled and one hand stretched out as if to claw her way to the ocean, and escape. A slow trickle of blood had begun to dry in a brown streak down her face, making her look as though she had a cat lip. Her short hair was mussed, and the blue cap on her head had slipped down to cover half of her face. John thought he was probably glad about that. 'She looks nice,' he said quietly. 'What do you want me to do?' 

The ghost lifted her hand and the young girl's body began to slide, her drifting hand bouncing and leaving fingermarks in the white sand. John jumped out of the way as the body slid into the shade of the cliff-face, arm propped against it, head curled in on herself. Her nose kept dripping, now forming a tiny puddle next to her cheek.

'Write,' commanded John's guide, and he didn't question it. He dipped his finger gingerly in the blood, feeling the grit shiver at the bottom of the puddle, and smeared a G on the wall. 'You're lucky I don't have normal doctor's handwriting,' he said cheerfully as he wrote, not sure how exactly he  _could_ be cheerful any more than he was sure where the word he wrote was coming from. 'Although, I'm not actually a doctor really, I do diseases and stuff but I don't have any actual patients or anything, sooo...' A scribbly A and M had now taken their place next to the first letter. 

'Luck wasn't really involved,' corrected the ghost. 'It doesn't matter at all any more.' 

GAMZEE, said the wall. John knew it was the thing he was supposed to write, but he had no idea how. A little grossed out, he wiped his pointer finger on his jeans and stepped back. 'Sorry,' he muttered to the sad face of the girl. 'Man, I wish I could have done more than just get that other douchebag implicated, huh.' He turned to the ghost. 'How come you didn't save her life?' 

'This way,' said the ghost, and somehow John knew what was coming. He followed her back into the fold formed in the cliff-face, and stepped out the other end of the alley, next to the bus stop.

'Thank you for your time and your life,' said the ghost, but the huge weighty apathy was gone from her voice, and so was the accent. John hadn't realised the traces of personality she retained until they were gone. This was a recording, he figured, something she said at the end of every task. There was no way this was the first time the hand of Death had needed somebody physical to help it out! 'Your liaison will contact you next time you are required. Do you have any questions at this time?'

'Oh! Yeah,' he said, giving the creepy floating girl a friendly smile. 'You never said, miss ghost lady. What's your name?' 

The ghost blinked, for the first time. John's bus pulled up and he found himself on board. He intended to watch the ghost and see where she went, but a great blanket of heat and exhaustion crept over his shoulders and he found himself asleep as the bus pulled away.


	2. Chapter 2

The ghost came for John at least once a month, sometimes more, and the pattern was always the same: the dingy alley next to John's research facility would stretch and distort like a funhouse mirror grown to encompass the very air, and John would stumble out the other side to complete some small inexplicable task, or some large one. Once, all the ghost wanted him to do was to move a discarded 8-ball two inches away from a woman's cooling body. There were scratch marks in the black tile floor from the points of her stilettos, and a blood vessel in one of her eyes had popped, covering her whole eye with dark marbled red. The 8-ball's surface had cracked, and behind it the blind surface called defiantly: CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN. John bent down and wiped his thumb over a scratch, but they didn't disappear.

And always, always, the scenes were permeated by a tiny edge of that strange calm John had first noticed about his guide. He was never once sickened or frightened by what he saw, and he never felt more than a passing regret for the lives he saw pass in front of his eyes. John and the ghost stepped into the alley and did what task was demanded of them, and then they stepped out again next to the bright bus stop, with nobody knowing they were there.

'Thank you for your time and your life,' she said, when they were back at the bus stop. The ghost camouflaged with the grey light of the city, and John had to squint to see where she hung (he could not say she floated, or she hovered, because he had never gotten the impression that she was light). 'Your liaison will contact you next time you are required. Do you have any questions at this time?'

'Yeah, and it's, like, the fifth time!' said John. 'What's your name?'

The ghost blinked. John's bus pulled up. He sighed. 'Do you even have a name?'

Her mouth moved, just as he gave up and stepped on board. His eyes already closing, he struggled to concentrate on what he had just seen. The ghost's lips opened, her small dark mouth had said... _Yes_ , he thought, _yes_ , it looked like, but he wasn't sure, and he was so tired…

-

'Thank you for your time and your life,' said the ghost. 'Your liaison will contact you next time you are required. Do you have any questions at this time?'

'Oh! Hey! I got you this,' said John, and pulled an orange out of his jacket pocket. He had made special effort to wipe as much of the blood as he could off his fingers first (although nobody seemed to notice when he didn’t bother.) He lobbed the orange up toward her.

The ghost did not catch it, and it did not go through her, but hit her lightly in the stomach. She folded up around it like fabric in water, rippled for just a second, and then she was the same as before and the orange sat forlornly on the ground.

The ghost looked at John. John looked at the ghost.

‘You know, most people don’t bother talking to their messengers,’ she said, the same curious calm in her voice. ‘You should probably stop trying.’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, equal portions angry and curious. The bus pulled up.

-

'Talk to her,' said the ghost, and John stepped uncertainly toward the hospital bed.

'Hi?' he said, nervously. Propped up on at least five pillows, an old lady smiled back at him. 'Are you my guardian angel, then? I wasn't expecting quite this... undergraduate a messenger, but it's very nice of you to come and greet me, dear.'

'Oh. Oh, haha, no,' he said nervously. 'I'm actually a microbiologist. I think it's just the hair that makes me look younger, but I guess that is probably a good thing, looking younger, right?'

The lady appeared to seriously consider the question. 'Do you know, you might be right, dear. Very well. I agree to accept that a young man would just happen to walk into my ward on the day I die and to have a proper cheery conversation with you, but only on the condition that you not talk about microbiology.'

'Are you not a very sciency person?' asked John. 'Because I actually think everybody could be a sciency person if they were taught right.' He took a seat on the awkward plastic chair next to the woman's hospital bed. The ghost floated by the door.

The old lady laughed. 'I had two degrees in science, dear, and I designed a line of dresses, too. I don’t think everybody can be a sciency person, frankly, but I really was one. Honestly, I just think I am all scienced out for this lifetime.’

‘Heh,’ said John. ‘Okay, fair enough. I promise only to talk about cool dumb things, like Ghostbusters.’ (A small but audible snort came from behind him.)

‘Mmm,’ hummed the woman thoughtfully. ‘I think I prefer vampires to ghosts.’

‘No way, man!’ John sprang into a defence of ghosts immediately. ‘Vampires aren’t even a thing that are real, and all they are is people but bitey.’

‘But aren’t ghosts just people, but, er, see-through?’ said the old lady. ‘I guess you could make arguments about immortality, but really that applies to both. I…' She smiled ruefully, and confessed, 'I don’t know where I was going with this argument, honestly.’

‘I am not going to laugh at you,’ said John charitably, ‘because you are dying of -’ he peered at the small sheet at the end of the bed - ‘pancreatic cancer, and that would not be very nice of me at all.’ His smile disappeared as he said it.

‘Yes, I am,’ said the woman with a small and sarcastic smile. ‘Thank you for bringing it up.’

‘Do you, uh.’ Suddenly, John was awkward, and he felt out of place in the quiet room. He and his vitality of life had no right here, at the side of a sickbed, with a dead woman and a dying one. ‘Do you mind a lot about that?’

‘No, not really,’ she said, musing. ‘I think I had a pretty good life, honestly, and my wife died three years ago so… yes, I think I am ready to follow her.’ She turned properly to John, faded green eyes finding his. ‘Do you know if I’ll see her, after this?’

‘Factually?’ said John honestly. ‘I have no idea.’

‘Oh well,’ she sighed. ‘I do appreciate you coming and talking to me.’ She settled on the pillows and shut her eyes. ‘I feel much more sorry for that young girl next door, who I’m told has about four months to live. That makes me much sadder than little old me dying after I’ve done everything I wanted to. Thank you for coming and talking to me, dear… and if you see Rose in your travels, you might want to tell her I miss her.’

The breathing slowed, and not very suddenly, there were two ghosts and one John in the room. The old lady’s eyes looked like John’s ghost, but her clothes were the same as they had been in the hospital bed, and she stood loosely on the floor, held up by invisible sticks.

‘You okay?’ asked John, smiling at her on purpose. The old lady’s ghost looked at him blankly. John stopped maintaining his smile: ‘...hey, tell me if you see Rose, okay?’ he asked, and the ghost turned and walked away without acknowledging him. John could not quite see where to.

‘This way,’ said John’s ghost, and he exited the hospital door and entered the grey bus stop street peculiarly shaken.

'Thank you for your time and your life,' said the ghost. 'Your liaison will contact you next time you are required. Do you have any questions at this time?'

‘What am I actually doing here?’ said John quietly. ‘That lady was really cool, and now she’s dead, and she doesn’t seem the same at all. And I realise that is a really weird complaint to make when somebody dies, but I don’t get it.’

The ghost hung motionless in the air, her blank pale eyes fixed on John.

‘What were you like before you died?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Did you like heavy metal or maybe soul music, and did you read books or play sports or have a weird interest in parakeets, and now that is all gone because you are some creepy flying deathmonger instead?’

The ghost said nothing. Her eyes shone.

‘What’s your name?’ he said, sulkily.

The bus paused, creaking, at John’s kerb, and he got on board.


	3. Chapter 3

John started looking up obituaries.

He did not have a particularly poisonous nature. He was not particularly angry at the ghost. But he was curious.

Very occasionally, he would recognise a death or a name in the newspaper, which always made his head hurt slightly. Once, he found himself jolted by a photo of a starving boy in southern Africa. The photo was taken two days before John stepped into a smelly hut and put down a small pile of food under a bench, a yard or so from the child himself. He never found a photograph of his ghost, though, and he supposed that was fair: after all, she could theoretically have been doing this for millenia.

John kept looking, anyway.

-

This particular day was different. The sky was not light grey, but dark and muddy. Whoever it was poured sand over the sky had run out, and had started to tip dirt over it instead: dirt that spilled and scudded in clumps and wet handfuls across the glassy sky. The air was electric. It hummed on the edge of rain.

The alley, though, was still cold, and the ghost said nothing today but pushed John straight into the whirling portal of the alley. He stumbled out into a world that was familiarly grey, but windy like the city never was. John felt the tips of his hair shuddering back and forth, and he buttoned his jacket up. Just like the first day.

He was standing in a grey field with short soft grass, on a small hill. In front of him was a smoking wreck of a factory, black dust billowing not just from the chimney but also from a gaping hole in the side of a building. Tiny drops of rain pulled at John’s skin as he walked toward the factory, leaving footmarks in the colourless grass.

The smoke did not make him cough, but it did make it harder to see. John wiped his glasses off four times in the first minute, before giving up and placing them folded in his pocket. Everything more than a couple of metres away took on a slight haze. John did not see the body as he walked up to it, but all the same he knew where to go.

The explosion had come from something electric and boiler-looking at the centre of a factory. Scorch marks spiked out from the ruptured metal and wires, a black spiny flower of soot and burnt floor. The woman’s body was charred and crumpled as if the blast had flung her through air and walls alike, which it probably had. Her hair had probably been long, John thought, but the edges of it had caught fire on some sparking circuit or other and now it was fizzled close to her face and smelt like scorched rubber. Remarkably, none of her bones looked broken, but her face and arms were burnt and her legs curled up under her hopelessly.

‘What do I do here?’ he asked, because oddly, he didn’t know. It took several tries for the words to come out.

John’s ghost said nothing. He couldn’t even see her anywhere.

‘Ghost?’ he called louder, standing up. His voice wobbled, jumped exactly to avoid his grief with surprising dexterity. He had never been this sad about a death before. John walked numbly into the next room, because it seemed he might as well, and there was nobody there - but John stopped and stared at a dull black-and-white picture on the wall, of a young man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, digging in the field John had just walked through.

John had dragged an older version of this body, recently twisted up by a cardiac arrest, out of a building pit and onto the fresh grassy ground just two weeks ago.

KARKAT VANTAS, said the plaque underneath. FOUNDER. 1931-1973.

Just two weeks ago… and yet, apparently, that was forty years in the past.

John felt confused, and his head hurt. ‘Ghost!’ he yelled. ‘Hello?’ He ran back to the room. ‘Ghost lady? Where are you? Look, maybe you could not tell me because of not being allowed or something and I am sorry I kept asking but I kind of really liked you even though you were a creepy flying emotionless lady so if you could come back, that would be really cool, and...’

He did not realise until he was done his speech that he was not speaking to the air, but to the battered corpse that lay huddled against a wall. Oddly like his very first job, a lifetime ago.

There was an employee identification card attached to her waist. John turned the fragile thing over between finger and thumb. The plastic slip was brown, curled and crimped at the bottom corner, and the ink on the paper had run in the heat and the blood, but the face was just recognisable.

The skin was brown instead of grey, and the woman looked about John’s age. Her eyes were sparkling dark red-brown, with normal-sized pupils of normal-coloured black. She was smiling happily for her photo, which was something John had never seen, but her high-cheeked face, small lips, defiant pointed chin…

The face belonged, unquestionably, to his ghost, newly dead and newly vacated.

John was not quite aware of his legs moving, but he sank to the floor regardless. Outside, he realised, the pace of the rain had increased until there was a steady quiet drumming on - on the building? on his head? he didn’t know. The rain drummed, his heart panicked in his chest, his head beat with questions. (when had he started calling the ghost _his_ ghost?)

_see when y0u are l00king at time fr0m a different realm_   
_time d0esnt really w0rk the same way_   
_m0st pe0ple d0nt get that ab0ut gh0sts_

The ghost had not died yet, in all the time she and John had been working, or perhaps she had and John was now back in the sixties again. Then again, this could be the future and John could be already dead and buried… time doesn’t really work the same way… ghosts, so it seemed, were outside of time altogether.

This was not what was supposed to happen.

John was lost. His stolen measure of deathly calm had deserted him. He did not know if he could watch his ghost be born, like the old lady in the hospital, watch the emotion die out of her completely. Frantic, fumbling, John scraped caked blood off the very bottom of the name tag and squinted to decipher the squashed black letters. _A…_

‘Ghost!’ he called, more panicked than ever, on the edge of tears, because he could not tell if she had deserted him, if he would be stuck here for ever with this corpse for a guide, if his errands had become more sinister and would trap him for ever. _A, P…_ what kind of name started with ‘ap’? Maybe it was an R, or a B…

_j0hn_

His finger brushed a thin rim of skin at her belly as he tried foolishly to rip the name tag out of its sleeve. The ghost appeared, for a second, flickering and staticky. (the body was still warm, and for a second he was gasping with tears.)

_let her g0_   
_y0ur j0b has n0thing t0 d0 with her_

John squinted at the paper. He could feel most definitively that this wasn’t what he was supposed to do. The room wobbled, twice. A familiar heavy exhaustion was settling warmly over him, and the room’s grey light seemed to skitter away from wherever he glanced. _A, R, A again..._ The room was filled with that impending panic John had heard in the edge of his ghost’s voice, the first time he met her. John’s teeth chattered. ‘G-ghost,’ he said loudly, ‘your boss sounds like a real dickhead.’

_j0hn egbert, y0u have a task t0 - what_   
_…_   
_which b0ss_

‘The one you have now you’re dead, obviously!’ he said. The whole room was flickering, now, and John was struggling to keep his eyes open. The grey light was not so much skittering as fraying at the edges. John grabbed the body (his ghost's body), because it seemed to be the most solid thing.

The ghost appeared again, at the edge of the flickering world. More than ever she looked not light but unutterably heavy, as if the sky was not enough to keep her floating. John thought he saw her hands shaking, but everything was shaking a little bit.

‘What’s your name?’ John called. The ghost’s image jumped sideways and then back, like a computer glitch.

_let her g0_

‘Fuck off,’ he shouted into the drumming and the whirling. The world was fraying at the edges and all that was left was a square metre of floor with John and the dead woman curled up on it. His fingers felt numb. John unfolded the card crumpled in his hand, staring feverishly at it. _ARIADNE. ARRIETTY. AR…_

‘Aradia!’ he shouted proudly. The ghost’s image jolted, again, and then disappeared, jumped itself out of existence. The drumming of the rain got louder, and John’s head flickered with bright angry colours. This was _not_ how things were supposed to go. Bright green skulls and the chattering of Death lurked behind John's eyes. The world was fundamentally wrong. John was more sleepy than he had ever been in his life: the world blurred and reshaped, fizzled, swam before his eyes.

This was not how things were supposed to go. Everything frayed and unravelled. The ground inched away. John found himself curled up next to Aradia, hugging her around the middle, and the world got warm and tingly and John could not resist sleep any more…

-

‘What did you do?’ said John, no he didn’t, somebody else said it. There was a girl sitting up next to him, in the sparking yellow light that crowded the bus stop. Both of them were sitting demurely on a park bench, hair brushed, face washed. Aradia was wearing a dark red sundress and knee-high boots. John looked down to find himself in jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt he had not seen for several years.

(ha.)

‘I don’t know what I did,’ said John. ‘Are you not allowed to tell people your name?’

‘It never came up,’ she said. ‘Which is really weird, but I guess most people don’t ask...’

John took her hand, which was solid and warm and could definitely hold an orange if he wanted it to, and smiled at her.

‘So I’m alive now,’ she said, staring out across the street. ‘Thanks, I guess.’ And she smiled back at him, honest-to-goodness she did. It was big and goofy and showed all her teeth and it was one of the most joyous things John had ever seen.

‘How does that even work?’ asked John. ‘I thought I was going to die, I mean, die as well.’

‘I guess...’ said Aradia, stretching her face up to the sky as if she had never seen it before, ‘I guess the universe is more flexible than we think it is? Whatever. I’m pretty happy not to know the answer!’

The sky was gold, like it is before sunset was properly sunset, as if whoever it was decided the weather up there had decided to melt coin after coin and pour them smoothly over the top of the world. John and Aradia sat at the stop, and the bus pulled up.

The two of them stood up. Aradia brushed down her dress, deliberately. ‘Do we… do we get on the bus?’ She was hesitant, slightly excited, still not quite sure she was allowed.

It didn’t look right.

‘I kind of hate this bus a lot,’ he said, and he carefully put his arm around her thin shoulders. Aradia turned and smiled up at him, not a sappy _so glad you are here_ smile but one that accepted all of the ways in which he was an idiot, one which thought he wasn’t funny and loved him anyway. The ghost had had years to see him at his worst.

The sun had come out. John and Aradia walked back to his apartment, hand in hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow holy shit. This was supposed to be, like, five hundred words, and then plot happened. I kind of wanted to make this an entire story about how they keep bumping into Gamzee the serial killer and he keeps cheating death (because, clowns), but I have AFaYC to write, no matter how shitty it is. And, you know, assignments and stuff. Please comment and give me feedback, because man do I love it, and maybe suggest a pair for me?? Thanks guys <3


End file.
